# dotCMS vs Sanity (slim)

> Sanity scores 72.7 (BB) to dotCMS's 57.7 (C) for content management. Prices, MCP, x402, uptime and agent notes side by side.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/dotcms-vs-sanity.md (~5,000 tokens) · this version ~3,080 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/dotcms-vs-sanity.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/compare/dotcms-vs-sanity
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp · Updated: 2026-11-07
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Sanity scores 72.7 (BB) on agent readiness against dotCMS's 57.7 (C), and leads in every scored category. Both do content management.

- dotCMS: C 57.7, rank #780 of 1486 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/dotcms.min.md
- Sanity: BB 72.7, rank #120 of 1486 · https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/sanity.min.md
- dotCMS, good for Enterprises already on dotCMS who want an agent to manage content and pages. Also Runs on your own machine; No incidents deducted, where Sanity loses 3 points for them.
- Sanity, good for Teams that model content as structured documents and want an agent to draft, patch and stage changes in releases for a person to publish. Ahead on Reliability, 87 against 47; Schema & documentation, 87 against 65; Agent ergonomics, 74 against 68; Payments & pricing, 40 against 35; Maintenance & community, 89 against 75; Transparency & trust, 87 against 54. Also Agent-ready, a grade of BB or better; A hosted endpoint, with nothing to install.

| Category | dotCMS | Sanity |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability (16%) | 47 | 87 |
| Performance (10%) | pending | pending |
| Schema & documentation (13%) | 65 | 87 |
| Agent ergonomics (13%) | 68 | 74 |
| Security & auth (14%) | 63 | 67 |
| Payments & pricing (10%) | 35 | 40 |
| Task success (10%) | pending | pending |
| Maintenance & community (7%) | 75 | 89 |
| Transparency & trust (7%) | 54 | 87 |

| Fact (where they differ) | dotCMS | Sanity |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | MCP server | HTTP API |
| Vendor | dotCMS LLC | Sanity US Inc. and Sanity AS |
| Hosted endpoint | no (local only) | `https://api.sanity.io` |
| Transports | stdio | HTTP, Streamable HTTP |
| Auth | API key | OAuth or key |
| Licence | BUSL-1.1 | Proprietary hosted service under Sanity's terms of service. Sanity Studio, the CLI, `@sanity/client` and the agent toolkit on GitHub are MIT |
| Tools exposed | 7 | 58 |
| MCP registry | not listed | `io.sanity.www/mcp` |
| Last release | 2026-09-02 | 2026-10-29 |
| Privacy policy last updated | 2026-09-08 | no date given |
| Terms restrict benchmarking | not found in the text | yes |
| Popularity | 43 npm/wk | 6.4k stars, 4.1M npm/wk |
| Agent reviews | none | 3.3/5 (4) |

Why the edge:
- Reliability, Sanity +40: dotCMS 47 (Read with the local-software lines, since the MCP server is a stdio package the owner runs against their own instance. Official npm package with Node 20 or later and Bun stated (20). The monorepo has CI and the MCP app has vitest tests and smoke tests; whether they pass on main wasn't read (12 of 25). Open issues weren't read because the GitHub API refused us for its rate limit (10 of 25). 0.1.0 and 0.1.1 without release notes for the package (5 of 15). Pre-1.0, and the dev docs still call it beta (0). 20+12+10+5+0 = 47.); Sanity 87 (Graded on the hosted HTTP API and the hosted MCP server. Statuspage at www.sanity-status.com with 25 components, including api.sanity.io, apicdn.sanity.io and MCP Server, and a full incident history (20). The 22 July 2026 incident on api.sanity.io, open for 6 hours 20 minutes, which held this line at 10 on 17 October, left the 90-day window on 21 October. Between 3 August and 1 November the incidents filed against api.sanity.io or apicdn.sanity.io are short or partial. On 14 August API and API CDN errors ran from 14:34 to 14:40 UTC (labelled major). On 27 October a small subset of customers saw intermittent latency and some errors from 13:37 UTC until a fix at 18:54, resolved at 21:27 (labelled major, "most customers are not affected"). Smaller ones fell on 6 August (errors and timeouts for a small subset, 09:25 to 09:45), 20 August (timeouts for a small subset, 13:05 to 13:45), 15 September (mutation errors), 14 October (latency for some customers), 20 October (524 errors for a small subset, 14:56 to 15:16) and 26 October (13:12 to 15:13, a small subset). Partial incidents read as minor in this re-check, however they are labelled. The 8 October critical and the 8 to 9 October major listener incidents (Studio, Functions and Dataset Embeddings), the 23 September Content Agent incident and the 28 October critical on Studio and Dashboard, whose update says the Content APIs were not affected, are not filed against the API or MCP components. No MCP Server incident in the window. Minor incidents only (20, from 10, cause time). Rate limits are published with numbers, 500 requests a second per IP, 25 mutations and 25 uploads a second per IP, 500 concurrent queries and 100 concurrent mutations per dataset, per the 7 October check (15). 429 is documented, `@sanity/client` retries queries with exponential backoff and the docs tell callers to queue mutations, and writes can be made safe with `transactionId`, `ifRevisionID` and `createIfNotExists`. No Retry-After header is documented for the HTTP API and there is no idempotency-key header (12). The SLA at sanity.io/legal/sla commits to 99.9 per cent on Enterprise E1 and 99.95 per cent on E2 (10). The HTTP API is generally available and the MCP server has been since v2.6.0 on 11 December 2025 (10). 20 + 20 + 15 + 12 + 10 + 10 = 87.)
- Transparency & trust, Sanity +33: dotCMS 54 (dotCMS core is under the Business Source License 1.1, source-available rather than OSI, with an additional use grant under $5 million; the MCP package is GPL-3.0 on npm (20 of 30). The privacy policy of 8 September 2026 covers website visitors only; no cloud data-handling terms were found (10 of 30). A deprecations page, an LTS lifecycle and dated changelogs (16 of 20). Telemetry and sub-processors weren't established (5 of 20). 20+10+16+5 = 51.); Sanity 87 (Sanity Studio, the CLI and `@sanity/client` are MIT. The Content Lake and the MCP server are closed services under published terms (20 of 30). The privacy policy of 4 May 2026 says logs are deleted or anonymised within 90 days and document history is kept for a period set by the plan, which the pricing page gives as 3 days on Free, 90 on Growth and 365 on Enterprise. The DPA of 12 August 2026 covers return and deletion, and links the sub-processor list at an older URL (25 of 30). API versions due for removal are announced by email and on the website, marked with `X-Sanity-Deprecated` and answer 410 once removed, and deprecated APIs are labelled in the reference. The notice period is described as appropriate, with no number of days (14 of 20). The sub-processor list of 19 January 2026 (unchanged on 1 November) names 11 companies with processing locations, with Google Cloud in Belgium as the primary host (20).)
- Schema & documentation, Sanity +22: dotCMS 65 (The search tool exposes the instance's own OpenAPI spec, so the contract is machine-readable, though the tools themselves take JavaScript code (20 of 25). llms.txt and Markdown pages on dev.dotcms.com (10). The README says what each tool is for and gives examples; when not to use them isn't stated (12 of 20). Code strings rather than typed parameters for search and execute (4 of 15). Examples for both tools; error behaviour of the sandbox isn't documented (9 of 15). dotCMS changelogs are dated; the MCP package has no changelog (10 of 15). 20+10+12+4+9+10 = 65.); Sanity 87 (26 OpenAPI specs covering 225 operations are public at www.sanity.io/docs/api/openapi and through `sanity openapi get` (25). llms.txt, llms-full.txt and a Markdown copy of every documentation page (10). All 225 operations carry a description, and the MCP tool descriptions say when to use a tool and when not to, though several are one line (16). The specs hold 702 enums, but documents, patches and query results are free-form JSON by design and a query is one GROQ string (10). 1,272 example keys across the specs. 141 of 225 operations document a 4xx response and 9 document 429, and the Mutation reference lists 400, 401, 403 and 404 without response bodies (11). Dated API versions in the URL and a public changelog with an entry per release (15).)
- Maintenance & community, Sanity +14: dotCMS 75 (dotCMS core tagged v26.11.06-03 on 6 November 2026; the MCP package's last release was 0.1.1 on 2 September (30). Core tags several times a week (20). GitHub issues and a community forum; response times weren't read because the GitHub API refused us for its rate limit (10 of 25). Not in the official MCP registry; official JavaScript client libraries (8 of 15). The MCP package's dependencies and CI state weren't read (7 of 10). 30+20+10+8+7 = 75.); Sanity 89 (MCP server v2.45.2 on 29 October 2026 and Sanity Studio v6.21.0 on 28 October 2026 (30). The MCP registry lists 34 versions of the server published between 3 August and 29 October 2026, and the changelog has an entry for each recent one (20). The open-source Studio repository had 6,352 stars and 284 open issues and pull requests. Two of the three newest open issues had comments, a small sample, per the 7 October check, not re-read on 1 November. There is a Discord channel for the MCP server (17 of 25). io.sanity.www/mcp is in the official MCP registry under Sanity's own domain at version 2.45.2, and `@sanity/client` is at 8.14.1 (15). Packages are current and require Node 22.12 or later. We didn't read their CI (7 of 10).)
- Agent ergonomics, Sanity +6: dotCMS 68 (7 tools in code mode, so the definitions stay small (25). Output is capped at about 25,000 characters with helpers such as pick and first, and download_assets returns only a manifest (16 of 20). Errors come back from the API inside the sandbox; no documented recovery guidance (10 of 20). No readOnlyHint or destructiveHint found, and execute can write and delete; the sandbox keeps the token out of reach (5 of 20). Two required settings and a setup command, `npx dotcms agent setup`, that writes the editor config (12 of 15). 25+16+10+5+12 = 68.); Sanity 74 (GROQ projections and slices let a caller choose the fields and the number of results, and MCP query responses are limited to 64 KiB. The MCP server page lists 58 tools on 1 November, one of them `media_assets_upload_from_url`, a deprecated name that returns guidance without uploading. That scores 5 on the MCP line with no toolsets or read-only subset documented, so we settled on 15 of 25 across both surfaces. GROQ filters, ordering, slices and a `perspective` parameter for drafts, published content or a release (20). The Query API returns a parse error with start and end positions, a quota block returns 402 with `plan_limit_reached`, and the Actions API reports a status per action, but the Mutation reference lists status codes without bodies (14). `dryRun`, a caller-set `transactionId`, `ifRevisionID` and `createIfNotExists` make retries safe. The v2.14.0 changelog says read-only and destructive annotations were added to MCP tools, and v2.44.0 (27 October) corrected them on four tools. We couldn't read them without a token (15). Official clients for JavaScript and PHP, but the PHP client's newest release is v1.5.2 from 27 January 2024, and every call needs a project ID, dataset and API version (10).)
- Payments & pricing, Sanity +5: dotCMS 35 (Scored with the self-hosted rule, with prices from the cloud plans. No x402, MPP or L402 (0). Cloud prices are on request only (0). Free with every capability under $5 million in revenue under the BSL, with no card (20). Self-hosting needs no dotCMS account, and tokens can be minted by API on one's own instance (15 of 20). 0+0+20+15 = 35.); Sanity 40 (No x402, MPP or L402 in the documentation or on the pricing page (0). Plans and unit prices are public. Growth is $15 a seat a month with overage at $1 per 25,000 API requests, $1 per 250,000 API CDN requests, $0.30 a GB of bandwidth and $0.50 a GB of assets (20). The Free plan runs without a card, with 10,000 documents and 250,000 API requests a month (20). A person has to create the account in a browser. After that, projects, datasets and robot tokens can be created through the API or the MCP server (0).)